Wednesday, May 2, 2018

"Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism"

What's that? Tesla? Meh.
You saw the options pricing going into earnings and, if you've been visiting the blog over the years you may also have the old-timey Brit nature show narrator on the soundtrack.
As the lions approach the wildebeest: "Sadly now, there can be but one outcome."

The straddle writers being the lions and the speculators being the wildebeest. The writers hedge in the equity so they at least pick up the vig but the absolute best outcome for them is a stock price close to unchanged and near a strike price. Early after-hours action: $302.75up $1.60. Why waste the pixels?Maybe more tomorrow but now a real Zuckster.

From The Atlantic May 1: Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism Either that, or he doesn’t care.

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that he cares, really cares, about journalism.
“I
view our responsibility in news as two things,” he said in a
wide-ranging conversation with a small group of news editors and
executives assembled in Palo Alto for a journalism gathering known as
Off the Record on Tuesday afternoon. “One is making sure people can get
trustworthy news.”

The other, he said, “is building common ground
in society.” It turns out that “common ground” is suddenly Zuckerberg’s
preferred euphemism. (That, and “community.”)

“You’re not going to
be able to bridge common ground,” he said, unless you have a “common
set of facts so that you can at least have a coherent debate.”
And here’s where the contradictions flood in.

Zuckerberg
runs a media company that distributes news, but doesn’t have a proper
newsroom. He runs a media company that has—with Google’s help—dominated
the vast majority of digital ad dollars and eviscerated the journalism
industry’s business model, all while preaching about the importance of
journalism. He runs a media company that, he says, believes deeply in
the need to sustain independent journalism, but won’t pay publishers to
license journalistic content. And he runs a media company that has
decided to show its users less news from professional outlets—it’s
really not what people want to see, he says—in favor of more individual
opinions.
According to Zuckerberg, the way you find common ground—a common set
of facts—is not through professional news outlets, but via individuals.
And Facebook, with its 2 billion or so users, has plenty of them. But
while Zuckerberg said Facebook is now ranking news outlets by
trustworthiness—in person, he didn’t seem to distinguish among the
quality of opinions.

“I do think that in general, within a news
organization, there is an opinion,” he said. “I do think that a lot of
what you all do, is have an opinion and have a view.”...MORE